Whatever Happened To Serendip?

May 25, 1997|By R. C. Longworth, Tribune senior writer.

Zaire, like Rhodesia, isn't what it used to be.

In fact Zaire, like Rhodesia, doesn't exist. The rebels who routed President Mobutu Sese Seko (who used to be named Joseph Desire Mobutu) renamed the country this month the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is what it was called in the '60s when today's ruler, Laurent Kabila, was learning rebellion in Elisabethville, the capital of the breakaway province of Katanga (now Lubumbashi, the capital of Shaba).

Rhodes, the British mining magnate and arch-imperialist, named Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia after himself because, as he said, that guaranteed immortality: The names of countries don't change.

Rhodes is dead now and so are the two eponymic countries. Northern Rhodesia is Zambia and Southern Rhodesia is Zimbabwe. For good measure, Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, is Harare now.

Rhodes notwithstanding, countries change their names all the time, for lots of reasons--national pride; a dictator's vanity; a desire to rewrite history, to forget the past or, conversely, to honor it.

Zaire is neither the first nor the last, although it may be the most enthusiastic.

First united as a Belgian colony, it became the Belgian Congo. When the Belgians went away in 1961, it became the Democratic Republic of Congo and descended into chaos. Mobutu renamed it Zaire in 1971. Now it's the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly the People's Republic of Congo, the former French colony that lies across the river for which both are named. The river, in turn, gets its name from an ancient African kingdom, the Kongo.

City names in Zaire/Congo change even faster. The capital, Kinshasa, used to be Leopoldville. Likasi used to be Jadotville, Kisangani was Stanleyville, Kalemie was Albertville, and so on.

Most of these name changes took place in the early days after the Belgians left and were a deliberate attempt to erase the memories of colonialism and to assert the nation's independence.

The Congolese were hardly alone.

Over the years, the Gold Coast has become Ghana; Fernando Po and Rio Muni became Equatorial Guinea, Nyasaland became Malawi; Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar and became Tanzania, Dahomey became Benin, and Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, which means "the land of the upright men" or, as they prefer, "the land of the honest people," which sounds better in Swahili.

The British called one of the Asian colonies Burma, which was as close as they could come to saying Bamar, the name of the majority tribe. In 1989, the Burmese changed the name to Myanmar which, according to their embassy in Washington, is an ancient name that translates as "fast and strong." For good measure, they changed their capital from Rangoon to Yangon.

Persia was renamed for the Iranians, a tribe that moved in about 2,100 years ago. Iraq used to be Mesopotamia, Afghanistan was Khorasan, and Sri Lanka was Ceylon. Thailand, in the old days, was Siam, which came from neighboring Cambodia. The new name comes from the Thai words for "land of the free."

Not all of these name changes are an improvement, euphonically speaking. Before it was Khorasan, Afghanistan was Ariana. Albania once was Illyria, Yemen used to be part of Sheba, and Sri Lanka, before it was Ceylon, gloried in the name of Serendip.

Surprisingly, few rulers are egotistical enough to name whole countries after themselves. Saudi Arabia may be the only nation named for a family, the Sauds, who have run it since Ibn Saud conquered it in 1913. The Saud dynasty won't last forever and neither will the country's name.

More often, dictators rename their countries to reflect their politics--the People's Republic of This and the Socialist Republic of That. Almost always, a country that puts "democratic" into its name isn't. Poland, Hungary and the other ex-communist countries of eastern Europe became democratic the day they stopped calling themselves that.

China is still a People's Republic. Algeria is both Democratic and Popular. North Korea, similarly, is Democratic and of the People. Libya's title proclaims it to be Socialist, People's and Arab. Somalia was a Democratic Republic under Mohamed Siad Barre, the dictator who drove it into ruin; today, it doesn't even have an official name, because it has no government.

The death of communism killed off the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and replaced it with 15 suddenly independent provinces, some of which also changed their names: Belorussia became Belarus and Moldavia became Moldova.

It also led to wholesale name changes among Russian cities. Those honoring Stalin, like Stalingrad, already had changed to something else, like Volgograd, 25 years earlier. With the demise of communism, cities named after Communist heroes--Leningrad, Gorky, Sverdlov--got changed to St. Petersburg, Nizhni Novgorod and Yekaterinburg.